4 April 2006
This month I led a delegation of entrepreneurs from
I was pleased with the results. The BiH businesspeople marketed themselves and their companies competitively. Prospective partners fielded sensible questions – about labour costs in BiH, infrastructure, human capital, the fiscal environment and so on.
The exchange was based on practical and timely business information. I often wish that this level of straightforward dialogue were more common in the political sphere.
Unfortunately, however, BiH is often spoken of in terms that are at least a decade out of date. Prospective investors want to know about telecom rates; journalists and politicians are more inclined to ask about crime rates. (For the record, the street crime rate in
The moribund postwar economy of the mid 90s is now growing at Central European levels and diversifying (hence those entrepreneurs in
Yet, when I led the BiH delegation to
This is absurd.
The BiH authorities opened Stabilisation and Association negotiations with the EU in November last year – after completing an ambitious reform programme which has brought the judiciary into line with European standards, unified the armed forces, and set in place the mechanisms of a successful free-market economy (5 percent annual growth for the last four years).
Accession to the EU is the platform of every major BiH political party, and the EU is therefore in a powerful position to make this goal conditional on the domestic authorities fulfilling their obligations (including full cooperation with the ICTY).
The EU must use this conditionality robustly, and as often as is required. At the same time, it must understand that BiH is making substantial progress – this acknowledgement will of itself increase the momentum of the progress that has already been achieved.
In other words, it’s not just what the BiH authorities do that will determine the success or failure of this country’s transition to full membership of the club of prosperous and democratic European states – it’s also what the EU does.
On the one hand, the EU expresses the hope that the BiH economy will continue to grow. On the other, it requires businesspeople from BiH to queue up at embassies in
Visa requirements were introduced for BiH citizens only in the 1990s. In those pre-Schengen days, people from this part of the world traveled to
Christian Schwarz-Schilling is the European Union’s Special Representative and the International Community’s High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina.